DEAR EDITOR:

The Ohio Legislature in 2021 approved a bipartisan school funding measure called the Fair School Funding Plan. The base of it was to account for actual costs to educate a student in a transparent manner.

The school funding system prior to this, by most people’s standards, was broken. That system had been described as having “no relation to what it cost to educate a student” with “the foundation dollar amount being a budgetary residual, which was determined by working backwards through the state aid formula after the legislature determined the total dollars to be allocated to primary and secondary education …”

The system was ruled unconstitutional multiple times by the Ohio Supreme Court. We finally have a funding system that is based on what it costs to educate a student and with facets of Substitute House Bill 96, we risk taking a step backward for Ohio school funding. The House version of the budget did not include implementation of the final two years of a six-year phase in of the FSFP nor updated the costs associated with educating students.

Substitute House Bill 96 also includes a provision that dramatically takes away local control of school districts from local school boards and local budget commissions.

It creates mandates of budget commissions to cut funding to schools from the local level if a district’s carryover balance exceeds 25%. Not only does this create the risk of declines in bond ratings of schools, instability in budget planning and in year-to-year variances in what local taxpayers pay but it also ignores the fact that we have locally elected school boards that approve school budgets and a locally elected budget commission that has powers already to question districts about their budgets through a process that takes place annually.

One of the reasons given for taking such action was the claim that schools in Ohio have high carryover balances. Many of the districts with higher carryovers achieved this due to offsetting expenses that would have hit their general fund by using federal ESSER funds. When you review projected carryovers in the out years of their five-year forecasts, carryover balances return to levels we have seen historically in school districts.

I join many in urging our local legislators to urge their colleagues not to go down this road as there is great potential for this to have negative impacts to districts across the Mahoning Valley and Ohio.

TERRY ARMSTRONG

War